Monthly Archives: August 2026

“How was your evening out on The Esplanade yesterday?” I asked Maury. I was sitting with him and Jess in Domus Logogustationis, and he was looking like he’d seen and done things he’d rather not have.

“Rebarbative,” Maury said.

“Oh dear,” I said.

“Wait,” Jess said. “I thought you went to see Hello, Dolly?”

“I had thought I was going to see Salvador Dalí!” Maury said. “But hello! And hell no!”

“Well, you said you were going to The Esplanade,” I said. “I could have told you that Dolly’s is the new cowgirl-themed bar where the Bier Markt used to be.”

“You could have,” Maury said. “You didn’t, but you certainly could have.”

“I thought you knew.”

“I do now.”

“So you didn’t enjoy it?” Jess said, innocently. 

Maury gave her a brief Kubrick stare. Then he inhaled and said, “Line dancing is… not my line of dancing. We each had a sixteen-dollar cocktail and I watched the whirl of activity and longed for less acute hearing. Narcissa had a thing called a Porn Star Martini. I was expecting local hummingbirds to seek it out. I had something made with whiskey, charred oak, sarsaparilla, and bitters, specifically because it was named Desperado, and I was desperate.”

“You didn’t stay long, did you?” I said.

“Well, no, only as long as it took to get the drink, plus several seconds to swallow it. And then Narcissa asked if I would like to go instead to a barbecue. Or I thought that’s what she said.”

“Oh dear,” I said. I knew what was coming, as I live at the other end of the block from the location in question.

“Was it not a barbecue?” Jess said.

“It was… a Barbie queue. A queue for the Malibu Barbie Café pop-up event, next door to Dolly’s.”

“And she already had tickets?” I said. I knew it was a forty-buck entrance, though I had not gone to it myself.

“Yes, it was a set-up.”

“Malibu. Barbie. Café,” Jess said.

“It looks like a Malibu Barbie playhouse,” Maury said. “Also, it looks exactly like several nightmares I have had.”

“A lot of pink,” I said.

“And I then realized why Narcissa was dressed all in pink. She had also brought a pink bowtie for me. Fortunately it was at least a real one, not a clip-on.”

“And how did you get through that experience?” Jess said.

“With the aid of prosecco and mojitos. At least there wasn’t any country music.”

Jess leaned forward, teasingly. “Did you get any souvenirs?”

“As a matter of fact…” Maury said, and reached into his pocket. “I at some point said to Narcissa that what I could really use was a phenobarbital.” 

He paused for effect. Then he said, “Behold.” And from his pocket he produced a flannel Barbie doll.

It goes without saying that as the evening progressed further we went without etymologically dissecting or otherwise tasting any of the words. But now we’re here, on my blog, and I’d like to.

First: Barbie. Obviously a short form for Barbara. The dolls were named after Barbara Handler, the daughter of Ruth Handler, who invented them in the late 1950s. The name Barbara in its various forms has caught on, rather like a barb, but it’s not related to barb as in on a fish hook; that barb comes by way of Old French from Latin barba, ‘beard’. Instead, Barbara is Latin for ‘foreign woman’ (‘foreign man’ is barbarus); the vector for its use as a name is Saint Barbara – who also, of course, gave her name to Santa Barbara, which is just a bit more than seventy miles up the California coast from Malibu.

Foreign woman? Yes, a barbarian, literally. Some people have at some times thought that barbarian came from the same word for ‘beard’, distinguishing foreigners as bearded people. But it does not. Latin got it from Greek βάρβαρος barbaros, and (a) ancient Greek men commonly had beards, so a beard was not a mark of a foreigner, and (b) the Ancient Greek word for ‘beard’ was γένειον geneion. Instead, it is commonly accepted that βάρβαρος was just imitative of the speech of the foreigners. It was like calling them “blah-blahs.”

On the other hand, the rather barbed word rebarbative, which means ‘repellent’, does come from barba – by way of Middle French rebarber, ‘oppose’, as in stand beard-to-beard against. (As to barbecue, although it has sometimes been attributed to a Bar-B-Q Ranch, it’s from Taino barbakoa, the name of a frame of wooden sticks that was used for cooking or curing meat or fish. And queue comes from Latin cauda, ‘tail’.) 

Now, having talked about Barbie, we come around to dolls, or, more to the point, to Dolly. Classically, Dolly has been a pet name for Dorothy or, later, for Dolores; Dorothy comes from Dorothea, ‘gift from God’, the same roots as Theodore, while Dolores is from Spanish for ‘sorrows’, and became a woman’s name from María de los Dolores, Mary of the Sorrows – one of the presentations of the Virgin Mary. But the most famous Dolly of our times, Dolly Parton, was christened Dolly Rebecca Parton – not short for anything (rather like being named Jack or Cindy from birth: why not just go with the version everyone will use anyway?). And in that sense, Dolly is, well, like a doll. 

And where does doll as in a stuffed or carved or moulded homunculus come from? Heh heh, from Dorothy. Yes, that’s right, a doll is a doll because a typical name was Doll, and dolls could have as easily been called molls or kates or barbies or any other common name for a girl.

And all of the above means that Barbie doll, etymologically, is ‘foreign woman, gift from God’, but specifically in a cute, affectionate way.

Oh, and phenobarbital? It’s from pheno- from Greek φαίνω phainō ‘come to light, manifest’ (as seen in epiphany and also, lightly changed, in Tiffany, which has exactly the same roots as theophany ‘manifestation of a deity’), plus barbital, which is from barbiturate, from German Barbiturat, which probably comes from the name Barbara plus the root we see in uric and urine. Yes: phenobarbital could be said to mean ‘a vision of Barbie’s piss’. Maury should feel grateful he just got the doll.